🙌 Hello everyone, this is Aleks for yet another Uncoffee issue.
The thing with coffee is that there are so many recipes on top of it. It’s highly commercialized. For me coffee has two purposes: to either wake me up and make me feel less tired, or to use it as some time and space for myself. When it comes to the first one I am really not picky. I will go with whatever I can find in the first bakery. Most of the times it tastes like boiled water with few beans of coffee from last year. Well, I just go with the situation. If it’s really unbearable to drink, I throw it. But each time I see the fancy coffee shops selling the weirdest things on top of coffee, I feel huge amount of empathy for the people that consume it. It feels as if they will never have the chance to taste a properly brewed coffee. And that makes me cry inside, a bit.
I guess I am writing all this as a reminder of the purpose of this newsletter. My main goal is to promote more ritualistic culture of brewing and drinking coffee, in the simplest form. Coffee drinking is therapeutic! You don’t have to be a barista, neither you need to spend your whole afternoon tweaking the best recipe. Go with whatever you can come up with and give yourself some time and space to enjoy it. Rinse and repeat.
Talking about fancy coffee shops and Starbucks copycats one cannot not think about all those frappuccinos, mochaccinos, bananacinnos. I avoid them for two reasons: I fail to taste the coffee in between all the ccinos, and second they are really heavy in calories - very unhealthy. I’d rather do cake. So if you wanna try something different, much healthier yet resembling a desert, try this: Flat White prepared at home, with minimal equipment. Or if you fancy other name - latte, just rather smaller.
What is Flat White?
Espresso as basis, with dense milk foam on top served in normal cup. ✅
So you will need to figure out a way to brew espresso at home. Or, here comes the relief, you can use any type of coffee you want. If you have a Moka Pot I would propose to go with Moka Espresso, but also pour-over filter would really taste good as a basis to the flat white. The catch with the Flat White is to bring that fancy foam drawing on top, which is something you want to avoid as expectation when doing it at home. The foam is thickest if brewed through an espresso machine. Brewing Moka Espresso will give you a lookalike espresso (and if you try you might be able to catch a foam), but you can also live without the pine tree thingie on top of your flat white. At the beginning focus on two questions: for the base - what type of coffee will you use? And for the top (the milk-foam), how are you going to make it?
So how do I make a milk-foam?
The easiest way to make that foam is to use a french press.
That is why I mention all those utensils when I described the MVP of equipment. Let’s see how it’s done the french press way.
You need a cup of milk (make sure the amount gets in contact with the end of the french press’ plunger - the filter itself).
Warm the milk but don’t heat it. As it’s warming up put a tablespoon of sugar. Mix it well with the milk and pour it into the French Press. Then do rapid up-and-down movement with the plunger until the movement becomes difficult.
Then leave it for few minutes, and then repeat. Do this few times and then open the french press. The milk should have turned into a foam. If not, repeat.
The art is to parallelize the brewing of the coffee times and the creation of the foam. If you do pour-over filter, do the foam as you warm up the water, or whatever part of the process takes the most. If you do Moka Espresso, feel free to brew the coffee first and leave the pot in a container with cold water (not very long though). The key is not to allow the coffee to over-brew and the foam to soften up. With training things become much better 👌.
All great, but what about the kids?
you might ask. And you’re right. One treat for the kids I like to do sometimes is some hot cocoa as the base for the flat white. We call this Cacaocinno at home. See, all win!
The great thing about this way of preparation (with emphasise on the milk foam) is that you can use any milk you want. Oat milk, almond milk. You can go full vegan and the foam will (well, it should) still be solid.
Now use some nice spot at home or your yard and have a sip of the simplest form of coffee-based desert we just prepared!